Sarcasm & Ambiguity Flashcards
- Metalinguistic Awareness
2. Sarcasm & Ambiguity
- Metalinguistic Awareness: the ability to reflect on the nature of language
- Linguistic phenomena that express complex and multidimensional meanings
- Changes throughout school-age years, adolescence, and adulthood
- Impacts literacy development
Assessments
- Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language (CASL)
- – Idiomatic Language
- Oral-Written Language Scale (OWLS)
- – Listening Comprehension of Idioms
- Social Inference-Minimal Test (SI-E)
- – Assesses comprehension of sincere vs sarcastic exchanges
- Social Inference-Enriched Test (SI-E)
- – Assesses lies vs sarcasm
- Social Emotional Evaluation (SEE)
- – Understanding Conflicting Messages/Identifying the true meaning of a message
Ambiguity
A word or expression that can be understood in two or more possible ways
Why Do We Need to Understand Ambiguity
- Humor
Q: “What did the short tree say to the long tree?”
A: “I’m stumped.” - Newspaper Headlines
— Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges
— Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half
Understanding Ambiguity
Understand words have double-meanings
Appreciate linguistic contexts
Nonlinguistic information may be required
Components of ambiguity
1.) Isolated Sentences
“It’s too hot to eat.”
2.) Humor
Riddles, jokes, and comic strips
3.) Advertisements
“Designed to move you.” (Ford)
Research Results from Interpreting Ambiguous Sentences with Adults
- Lexical Ambiguities
— Double-meanings were detected the fastest
- Surface-Structure Ambiguities
- Deep-Structure Ambiguities
Overall Findings:
- Children were able to best interpret the double meaning in sentences containing lexical ambiguities
- Both surface-structure and deep structure ambiguities were about equal in difficulty level
4 types of ambiguous sentences
1, phonological- Changes in the pronunciation of 1 or more words in a sentence
- lexical- A word/phrase has 2 different meanings
- surface structure- Variations in intonational patterns (stress & juncture)
- deep structure- Noun can serve as either the agent or the object
- Understanding of the 4 ambiguity types increased with age
- Phonological ambiguous sentences were the easiest for children of all ages to detect and explain
- Surface-structure and deep-structure ambiguous tasks were the most difficult for children to understand
Addressing Syntactic Ambiguity in Therapy
- The grammatical construction of the phrase or sentence brings about the misinterpretation
— Ex.) “I know a man with a friend who plays baseball.”
—— Who plays baseball?
- We need to clarify the meanings of an ambiguous sentence by expressing the same idea but using a different form of words or grammatical terminology
— Ex.) “The man’s friend plays baseball.
The Importance of Humor
- “Real-world language”
— A naturally occurring part of children’s culture
- Interwoven with linguistic and cognitive development, abstract reasoning, and factual knowledge.
- Promotes peer acceptance, self-esteem, and personal adjustment
- Provides a socially acceptable way to manage anxiety associated with peer relationships and physical changes
Jokes & Riddles
- The humor in jokes results from the incongruity between 2 sentences and its subsequent resolution
- Four types of ambiguous jokes & riddles
— Phonological
— Lexical
— Surface-Structure
— Deep-Structure
Jokes
- Ability to target the critical ambiguous elements improved as participant age increased
- Jokes based on phonological ambiguities are the easiest to identify
- By middle adolescence, children are quite adept at understanding jokes involving linguistic ambiguity
- Cognition plays an important role in understanding humor
Riddles
- Ability to target the critical ambiguous elements improved as participant age increased
- Riddles based on lexical ambiguities are the easiest to understand
- Phonological, surface-structure and deep-structure ambiguities were equally difficult
Components of Understanding Humor
- Reading Comprehension
—- Decoding Skills
——– Real and Non-sense Words
- Word Knowledge
Idioms in Jokes & Riddles
- Detection of the idiom was easier than the explanation
- Performance improved with age
— Oldest participants had still not mastered the task
- Jokes & Riddles containing idioms may be a gradual process that remains incomplete into late adulthood